Whereas liberal currents seemed to be the advancing wave of the seventies, the tide receded in the eighties and the offensive passed from those who wished to push forward to those who wished to pull back. The reasons for this turn of the tide were complex and not due to factors within Ireland alone. Intricately tied in to the ebb and flow of an increasingly globalised market economy, Ireland felt the full impact of economic recession and the accompanying wave of ideological reaction.

As to why world markets were in recession and why Ireland faced economic crisis, there was a seemingly impenetrable web of mystification. Either it was spoken of as a mysterious and inexplicable force of nature or it was put down to specific acts of will, such as an arbitrary decision of Arab sheiks to raise the world price of oil or the profligate spending of Fianna Fail governments. It was, however, neither inexplicable nor so simply explicable by such specific causes. What was at stake could only be explained in terms of much larger forces. What was really happening was a global restructuring of capital. There was an economic crisis, because there was a struggle underway for a massive re-allocation of the world's productive resources and re-negotiation of the international division of labour. The post-war world was marked by inroads into the rate of profit made by the labour movement's struggles for higher wages and social welfare provisions, by the third world's challenges to the first world's ability to extract cheap raw materials and cheap labour from it and by various liberation movements, demanding the rights of excluded groups to their place in the sun, their right to produce and to share in what was produced.

In response, there was an attempt to reorganise the system so as to stem the tide, to re-seize the initiative and to restore an acceptable rate of profitability. It was a response, due less to a conspiracy of minds and wills than to the mechanisms of a system in disequilibrium functioning to restore equilibrium. The mechanism, the capitalist system, was pushing back to its original impetus, the unfettered free market, and pressuring to eliminate the fetters that had accumulated against its free functioning. Thus there came the recession, the receding tide, bringing the closing down of industries, the cutbacks in public expenditure, the decline in employment and the erosion of the power base of the trade union movement. Thus came the push to privatise and to dismantle the public sector, with its ideological concomitant in the glorification of the entrepreneurial spirit and individual acquisition, its cynicism about higher ideals and its rejection of social movements.

Crucial to the whole scenario was the new technology, brought in with breathless hard sell for the hardware of the electronic cottage, the paperless office, the wired society. Suddenly the bookshops were full of paperbacks with titles like The Mighty Micro, The Micro Revolution and Microman. The airwaves were alive with media pundits, initiating us into the glories of 'the information age’, 'the third wave', 'the satellite era', 'the communications revolution', 'future shock' and 'post-industrial society'. There was a great torrent of words, full of the new slogans of 'information is power' and 'information for all', full of promises of a new leisure society, of new interactive capacity, indeed of a whole new era of democratic participation and consumer sovereignty.

However, all of these euphoric discoveries about the wonders of the microchip and future scenarios opened up by it tended to have a smothering effect, making it nearly impossible to see the wood for the trees. What was systematically obscured in it all was the whole dimension of the political economy of the information age, the structure of power of the third wave, the ownership and control of the wired society. The communications revolution was developing according to the imperatives of the market economy. Every mode of production generates a communications apparatus specific to its structural need to maintain and to expand itself. The new technology was being assimilated to the monetarist strategy of de-industrialisation, deregulation and automation. It was being used as an instrument for a retooling of the productive apparatus and a pruning of the work force, to pave the way for a whole new phase of capital accumulation. It was providing the technological basis for a new cycle of productivity, for a new level of control over patterns of production, distribution and consumption, for new forms of labour and social relations. It was making possible an unprecedented concentration of ownership and accumulation of wealth at the top, at the expense of an increasing marginalisation and impoverishment at other levels. Up against the power of stateless money, even the nation state was becoming increasingly powerless.

With the forces at work being so faceless and with the overall process seeming so impenetrable and out of control, the attempt to understand the world and to get a grip on it sometimes gave way to a retreat to the security of old certainties and to an appeal to supernatural intervention to take external control of a world with no apparent means of internal control. While satellites whirled in orbit overhead, a large part of Ireland retreated into its peasant past and fixed its gaze into the dark world in which plaster statues moved and uttered messages for mankind. Gathering around the kitsch icons of a mythical virgin-mother and addressing their supplications to persons long dead, if they ever really existed, it turned its back on the real, if not so virgin, mothers who might be dying by their grottoes in the dark of the night and closed its ears to the realities of the living.

At the same time, it could not get enough of the televised rituals of British royalty or affairs of Dallas and Dynasty personae, no matter how parasitic and predatory their lifestyles, no matter how illicit and frivolous their liaisons, no matter how contrary to its own declared values. Yet it reaffirmed its refusal of the most minimal legal legitimacy to the most decent couple next door, who might be bound together in a second union. Those who were most enthusiastic about the visit of the US President to his tenuous roots on Irish soil and were most fawning and forelock tugging before Ronald and Nancy Reagan didn't seem nearly so troubled about divorce and remarriage then. But when it came to the battered wife down the road or the deserted husband across the way, the same gushing hearts were hardened and determined that their neighbours should lead blighted lives, in the ruins of devastated relationships, so as not to threaten their own sacred marriages. During the referendum on divorce, they constantly asserted that they did not want their country to be like Dallas and Dynasty, yet they did not want to do without Dallas and Dynasty either. Nor did they want to confront the meaning of the voyeuristic pleasure they took in it.

Ireland found its own confused and contradictory ways of combining old and new, of welding anachronistic traditions to the latest technologies, Knock being the most potent symbol of its ironic mixture of apparitions and airplanes. In this strange world of 1980s Ireland, mountainy men minded their sheep wired up to walkmans. Married couples came home from confession and communion to their thatched cottages and inserted a pornographic video into their VCRs to help their sex lives. Unemployed youths left their space invaders games to build bonfires and to follow the beat of the drum once the orange marching season began again.

Not that Ireland was alone in manifesting such gaps between advanced technology and antiquated traditions. America was full of fundamentalist evangelists preaching born-again christianity, creationist biology and reactionary politics-via satellite broadcasting. A society that mastered silicon chips, laser surgery, supersonic transport, satellites and space shuttles fantasised itself as Rambo. The most sophisticated cinematography was put at the service of the silly supernaturalism of ET, Gremlins and Back to the Future. The most complex technology was enlisted in the flight from complexity into simple images that were infantile, but by no means ideologically innocent. A society that penetrated the secrets of the atom and pioneered the most awesome applications of its energy put the ultimate state power in the hands of a man with a comic strip mentality. It was a society whose technological capacity far outstripped its wisdom. It was a society producing more and more channels of communication for those who had less and less to say. And, with an insensitivity born of its internal contradictions, it continued to produce high grade hardware to disseminate low grade software.

Ireland became caught up in the whole worldwide shift to the right. A massive wave of reaction overtook the progressive advances of preceding decades. It heard and saw and added its own to what was being said and done elsewhere, in an ever more blatant backlash against socialism, secularism, feminism and any such causes championed by the left. Indeed, the strident selfishness, made ideologically respectable by the new right, took the offensive, even against the middle ground of support for public enterprise, concern for civil rights and campaigns for piecemeal social reforms. The urban yuppie element, willing to step over anyone or anything in the path of its aggressive acquisitiveness, was perhaps even more insidious than the older rural rosary-reciting element, wishing hellfire and damnation upon feminists, free thinkers and assorted liberals.

The fact that the much-heralded communications revolution was caught up in a tidal wave of reaction had drastic implications for the situation of Irish broadcasting. The fact that it was pressing ahead on an aggressive laissez-faire push for a massive shift of power and resources from the public to the private sector had obvious consequences for the whole future of public service broadcasting. RTE, like other European public service broadcasting organisations, had become caught up in the debate between those intent on defending and extending the values underlying the European tradition of public service broadcasting and those who believed that the free market should reign supreme.  In Thatcher's Britain, the free market option was in the ascendant. The Hunt Report in 1982, the White Paper in 1983 and the Peacock Report  in 1986 came down firmly on the side of de-regulation of broadcasting, breaking with the reithian tradition in British broadcasting.1 The way was opened  to a new level of commercial penetration, with a minimum of restriction on the free play of market forces, assuming that commercial competition was the surest guide to quality. Although the Peacock Report disappointed hard-line monetarists in failing to recommend the introduction of advertising on BBCTV, its other proposals supported the strategy of de-regulation and commercialisation, envisioning the eventual replacement of the licence fee with a pay-per-view system, based on scrambled signals only unscrambled by subscription.

The monetarist case came nicely packaged as widening the viewer's choice, as promoting diversity and initiative, as taking power from stuffy government bureaucrats and transferring it to the consumer. Underneath all the freedom-of-choice rhetoric, however, was the reality that it was freedom of choice only for those with the ability to pay. Moreover, the range of what they could choose was determined only by those with the resources to finance production. Paradoxically, real freedom of choice required public regulation, albeit a new democratic form of regulation, as opposed to the reithian elitist form of regulation. Defenders of the public sector pointed out that freedom for the pike was death for the minnow. The only real freedom of choice was restricted to the elite, who held the balance of power in the struggle for control of the world's telecommunications systems.  It was Rupert Murdoch and not the next door neighbour, who was acquiring shares in satellites who would decide what consumers could choose. What they would be able to choose was foreshadowed in US cities with over a hundred channels with various episodes of I Love Lucy on a dozen of them. Ironically, more channels might in practice mean less choice.

In Ireland, such debate as there was on this question was often under the surface and somewhat confused. The most explicit confrontation in the struggle between public versus private control of broadcasting erupted in relation to government moves against the pirate radio stations. The whole episode was farcical, in somewhat typical Irish style, not only because the illegal stations immediately resumed broadcasting, but because public reaction was so successfully orchestrated by the pirates and so far off the mark as far as any real understanding of the issues was concerned. The whole debate was posed as being between public broadcasting, as if synonymous with censorship, bureaucracy, centralisation and boring programming, and commercial broadcasting, as if opening the door to freedom of expression, decentralisation and exciting programming. Vincent Browne, then editor of the Sunday Tribune, was been particularly aggressive in making the case for deregulation, arguing that the same freedom as applied in publishing should apply in broadcasting and contending that the monopoly in broadcasting gave RTE an unfair advantage in attracting advertising revenue. Indeed, at a 1985 meeting of the Media Association of Ireland, he even asserted that he would not bemoan the closure of RTE..2 This argument, of course, glossed over the enormous inequality in publishing. Not everyone who felt they would like to run a national newspaper could launch The Irish Independent or The Sunday Tribune. The fact was that there had been an erosion of support for public service broadcasting. There was little sense of it being perhaps the only guarantee of any sort of freedom of choice, the only bulwark against wall-to-wall Dallas and the best hope for relevant and vibrant programming.

Between section 31 and the decline of RTE, perhaps it was no wonder. John A. Murphy, professor of Irish history at UCC, went so far as to raise the question as to whether there might be some government conspiracy to run down RTE to the point where the public would be glad to put broadcasting in private hands.3 RTE made no secret of their feeling that RTE had not been served well by successive governments. They argued that they were starved of funds and denied requests to devise a more efficient method of collection of the licence fee and that his meant that it lacked the necessary finance to satisfy audience demand for home-produced programming. A strategy of seeking co-production finance seemed to provide a partial answer to this problem, until the government clamped down on the tax-based investment schemes that formed the basis of RTE's limited partnership agreements. This hit drama production particularly hard.

Although Fianna Fail, back in government in 1987, introduced new incentives for private investment in film making, it tied this to the strategy of rolling back the role of the public sector, simultaneously abolishing the Irish Film Board. The future of the public sphere became ever more precarious with Fine Gael, Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats committed to quasi-monetarist policies on public spending and favouring the commercialisation of broadcasting in the context  of the aggressive mood of deregulation prevailing at the international level. The Labour Party , although a weak presence in the coalition government from 1982 to 1987, did prevent Fine Gael policies from finding their way into legislation. It did not, however, have the power to implement its own policies, which were against the commercialisation of broadcasting. The Fianna Fail government, facing no such obstacles, in October 1987 announced its intention of excluding RTE from local radio and of introducing commercial television.

Lack of government support has not been the only problem for RTE. There was increased competition from new sources, such as Channel 4 and VCRs. Also on the horizon were commercial alternatives, vying for audience and advertising revenue, in local radio, cable and satellite transmission. The very future of RTE seemed to be in question. RTE  was well aware of the threat. Muiris MacConghail, controller from 1983 to 1986, stated at the time of the publication of the Hunt Report  and then the White Paper  that it was the threshold to deregulation here as well as there and it would "rend the very fabric of public service broadcasting" He saw some hope of an alternative to the domination of international airways by US commercial interests in a concordat among European public broadcasting organisations in co-production and co-finance of programming alternatives. He emphasised the need to put together some sort of survival kit to defend public service broadcasting as the only alternative to being cannibalised by the Americans.4

Also addressing the global crisis in communications and the choices it posed for Ireland, Sean Mac Reamoinn stressed the need to have, not only a strategy for dealing with the symptoms, which related to the fact that broadcasting had become spastic, but also a philosophy for dealing with the basic disease, which was rooted in the fact that Ireland had lost its way. As broadcasting both moulded and mirrored its society, the problem needed to be tackled on both levels to be in a position to face the challenge of the new technologies of communication, "instead of watching with the glazed look of a mouse confronted by an army of cats."5 It was a brilliant image for capturing the vulnerability of a small nation, not quite believing in itself, confronted with the voracious forces looming before it. Taking up the mouse metaphor a few years later, Con Bushe argued the need for small countries like Ireland to harness their resources intelligently, if not to become cultural dependencies of the powerful and wealthy taking increasing control of the means of communication: "If the mouse is to survive alongside the elephant, she must think and act as a smart mouse and not as a mini-elephant" .6 He strongly defended the concept of public service broadcasting, while stressing the need for a new legislative and economic framework for it, if it was to renew itself and withstand the onslaught from the apostles of free trade.

Although many in RTE expressed a self-critical need for renewal within the parameters of public service broadcasting, others felt that RTE needed a shake-up that only breaking its monopoly and opening it to commercial competition would bring. This certainly seemed to be the thinking dominant in the national press, in the commercial sector and, most importantly, in both government and opposition in the oireachtas. Ted Nealon, the minister of state for communications in the coalition government, described the Hunt Report as 'a very good model' for coming to terms with the future of broadcasting in an Irish context. 7   Amidst all this, RTE has felt itself about to be swamped, fighting against formidable odds for both audience and advertising revenue.

The EEC looked at ways Europe could band together to withstand the American onslaught reflected in the "Television Without Frontiers" directive. RTE began to expand the net in drawing upon a wider field in its imported programming, showing more European, Latin American, Australian and Canadian material. Much of this sort of development was in the spirit of the MacBride Report’'s demand for a new world information order, which reflected international disquiet over the pattern of global information flows. UNESCO became a centre of protest against the one-way vertical flow of information from centre to periphery. Because of its calls for a reassessment of the values implicit in US media and the implications of US dominance of international communications, the US  withdrew its support for UNESCO.8

Nevertheless, the forces of protest against the encroachments of wall-to-wall Dallas were not so powerful as the forces out of which Dallas emerged onto the centre of the world's stage. Of course, the patterns of dominance in the televisual representation of the world were tied to the patterns of dominance in everything else. Even the UN was becoming a shadow of what it once was in the power struggle with the international financial forces in the ascendant in the world arena. Never before in history has so much power and wealth been so concentrated in the hands of such a faceless few. Not that they had a clear vision or unified strategy about what to do with it.

A discernible slippage of support for public service broadcasting made its presence felt even from within its own institutions. Even within RTE, there was a wavering in the face of the monetarist barrage. Although there was always a diversity of opinion regarding the balance between commercial and public service aspects of television, the shifting of the balance was a reflection of the general ideological climate, in which the fulcrum against which everything had to be kept balanced kept moving to the right. There was also a certain careerist courting of commercial contacts, so as to be able to jump ship at the right time and place.

RTE, like other such national institutions, was being caught in the middle between forces of increasing centralisation at one level and forces of increasing decentralisation at another. At the same time as there was a trend towards concentration of ownership and control of the commanding heights of world communications, there was also a trend towards fragmentation of production, transmission and reception on other levels, both of these trends making inroads against the middle level, nationally-based institutions heretofore in control of communications. It was the trend at the bottom that received most attention. The proliferation of cable and satellite and video cameras and players gave rise to proclamations of the de-massification of the mass media. Indeed, it was said that every viewer was becoming his/her own programme controller and even his/her own producer, director, editor, performer and crew. However, to get carried away with this sort of thinking was to equate ownership of a VCR with ownership of Sky or HBO and to put a student video project or a ten minute spot on late night Channel 4 on the same level as a production of Lorimar or Spelling or distribution by Viacom. It was true that more space opened up for independent production companies, but this did not put City Vision on a par with Paramount. Nor did it put Attracta in the marketplace with the same chance as Lace. Nor did it bridge the gap between the bank balance of those who made The Best Man and those who made Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Arguing that this communications revolution called for a reappraisal of the role and resources of RTE, the government commissioned a team of management consultants from the firm of Stokes Kennedy Crowley to carry out a review of the structure and of operations of RTE. It was an initiative not exactly well received by RTE, though it did not have much choice in the matter. It came in 1985 in the midst of a series of internal upheavals in RTE and as an instrument in a power struggle between the government and the RTE authority during which the government suspended appointment of a new director general until it could put a new authority in place. It was therefore difficult to take at face value the claim that SKC were brought in to provide an in-depth study of RTE necessitated by impending developments in broadcasting. As Gene Kerrigan put it, it was "the kind of story you'd need to be locked to believe and ought to be locked up for telling" 9 Of course, no one did believe it. Nevertheless, those who told it got their way. Not only that, but stuck RTE with the bill for it, adding to its already severe financial problems. There was considerable resentment in RTE on a number of counts. When the outgoing authority proceeded to appoint a new DG, despite the minister's request, the minister overruled the appointment. It was felt to be gratuitous interference in legal broadcasting from a minister who took no action against illegal broadcasting. RTE felt its efforts were being sabotaged by the government. It was being deprived of revenue and subjected to unfair competition through pirate broadcasting, which did not pay tax, PRSI, performing rights fees, etcetera. It was forced to abandon a number of co-productions in the pipeline, due to the action of the minister for finance in undercutting the financial basis for external investment.

It was also feared that the SKC report was to be the means, not only of affecting the appointment of the DG, but of laying the basis for the entry of the private sector into the more profitable aspects of public broadcasting.  Muiris MacConghail said it was time to say "no, minister".10 The atmosphere of uncertainty and upheaval already prevailing at RTE was sharply accelerated during the period of the SKC review. It was felt that RTE was full of people who understood the problems and possibilities of RTE in the satellite era better than any firm of management consultants ever would. It was felt that bringing in a commercial firm such as SKC was treating broadcasting as a commercial business like any other. It failed to recognise the difference between providing programmes and manufacturing packets of biscuits or tins of peas. It implied that it was possible to assess RTE by examining its financial and administrative structures, without reference to the particular character of its product. It could investigate costs, cash flows, staffing levels, work practices, fixed assets and the like, but it could shed no light on the quality, range and relevance of programmes. RTE did, however, co-operate with the SKC review and a number of groups within RTE, particularly the trade unions, made representations and submissions.  When the SKC report came out in September 1985, it recommended: rationalisation of managerial structures, revision of work practices and financial methods (total costing, indexation and direct collection of the licence fee, reduction of staff numbers), increase in home production by 35%, expansion of sources of programme production (in-house production, co-production, commission of independent production), development of international sales, provision of programming and services to satellite broadcasting, making software, rather than hardware, the investment priority.

RTE staff reaction to the report, although critical, was relieved that it did not recommend the worst that had been expected: the splitting up of RTE and the privatisation of the profitable areas of public broadcasting. The fact that it took on board suggestions made in trade union submissions evoked positive response and support for its proposals on total costing, the licence fee, managerial efficiency and higher output of home-produced programming. There was, nevertheless, criticism of it as a 'price is right' type of report, that did not deal with a number of issues of central importance, such as programme quality, industrial democracy and the relationship between RTE and the government. RTE undertook to reappraise its operations, both to implement such recommendations of the SKC report as it saw fit and to attend to matters of programme quality as well. There was a flurry of re-organisation, resignations, voluntary redundancies and new appointments.

There was an atmosphere of a new broom. By mid-1986, there was a new RTE authority, a new DG and new management across the board. There was a sense of things having been suspended in air, shaken up and beginning to settle down once again, so as to concentrate on the primary activity of programme making. The autumn 1986 schedule showed a 15% rise in home production, although it included the lowest ever output of home-produced drama. Drama had perhaps suffered most from the administrative upheaval and the financial crisis.

RTE drama in the early 1980s was not unlike that of the late 1970s. Such changes as came to characterise the eighties evolved and only became apparent over a period of several years. They did not suddenly erupt on new year's day 1980. Thursday Playdate and then Sunday One were regular slots for single plays with a strong drive towards realistic drama of contemporary social relevance. There was, however, a discernible drift in the direction of the policy characterising Niall McCarthy's time as head of drama, overseeing the virtual demise of single plays dealing with contemporary social issues.

The early 1980s plays were not, any more than those of the late 1970s, radical reassessments of the fundamental structures of Irish society or revolutionary visions of alternative structures. They were liberal probes into particular areas of social tension. They were not panoramic reconstructions of the temper of the times, but more flashlight illuminations of particular dark corners, close to the particular experience of particular authors. They were often revealing and insightful, but insofar as they were cameos without context, they were not perhaps as revealing and insightful as they might have been had they been constructed with a higher degree of contextual richness and socio-historical expansiveness. Many of these plays were domestic in setting and devoted to close-up examinations of family relationships at their pressure points. Accurately observed as some of these relationships and pressures were, most could have benefited from a more acute awareness of the evolution of the socio-historical context in which these relationships and pressures were rooted.

Parental tension came in for a fair airing. The generation gap was, of course, a perennial site of dramatic conflict, but the accelerating tempo of social change was widening the gap and increasing the difficulties of bridging it. Maureen Donegan's Choosing portrayed the growing pains of a young lad in his first year at university. Every new encounter, every new experience, seemed to open new cracks in the monolith that was his world and to bring new stresses in his family life. In outgrowing his parent's world and growing into his own new world intellectually, morally and socially, crucial moments were his first sexual experience with a more worldly-wise fellow student and his first encounter with the life of those working on Kinsale oil rigs. Maeve Binchy's Ireland of the Welcomes explored the differential effects of emigration on successive generations. It showed the enormous psychological and cultural gulf between Irish parents, who had emigrated to Britain, and their children, who had grown up there. The impending decision, about whether to return and build a new life for the family back in Ireland served as a stimulus for bringing such differences to a head. In the more confined world of The Lost Hour and its sequel The Key, adapted from John McGahern's novel The Leavetaking, growing pains took a heavier toll, as there was no such room for manoeuvre. Growing up in a back-of-beyond garda barracks, a sensitive young boy struggled to cope with the death of a mother and the life of an insensitive father, as he was saddled before his time with the weight of an adult world.

Parental pressures surrounding mating occurred again and again. Babies on the way had a way of resolving certain matters on the surface, while leaving certain deeper matters unresolved, in Teresa's Wedding and One for Sorrow. William Trevor's Teresa's Wedding showed an unwanted marriage, under the shadow of an unwanted pregnancy, arranged by parents and priest, fatalistically committing the next generation to resign themselves to reproducing the resignation of the generation that went before. Sean McCarthy's One for Sorrow showed two young people and four disapproving parents, under the pressure of pregnancy, followed by the birth and sad death of their baby.

Marital problems, not surprisingly, loomed fairly large at a time of continuing re-definition of sex roles and changing socio-sexual mores. A number of plays subjected the institution of till-death-do-us-part marriage to serious critical scrutiny and examined the particular pressures and acute contradictions surrounding it in an Irish context. Teresa's Wedding showed a very typical pairing under a very typical pattern of circumstances in a typical country town. On this very traditional terrain, on which no one had anything but the most traditional approach to sex roles and relations between the sexes, it was clear how enormous was the gulf between the separate psycho-social worlds inhabited by the separate sexes. Teresa, the typical girl, could only really talk to her girlfriends. Artie, the typical guy, could only really talk to his mates. The painful awkwardness in their perfunctory talk to each other was further underlined by their acute inability to establish any sort of eye contact, even when there was something important to discuss with each other. Not only was each closer to other friends than to each other, but all the external rituals of mating were far easier for each to cope with than their actual mate. In their traditional upbringing, most particularly for the female of the species, it was getting married that was the important thing, not the relationship with the person married. Teresa, like her sisters and friends, had always pictured her wedding in the (ironically titled) Church of the Immaculate Conception, followed by the reception in the very lounge bar in which she stood, with everything imagined to be exactly as it was. Only the bridegroom had been mysterious. He was only part of .the picture as a kind of vague, faceless, bodiless presence. Indeed, at the actual wedding the actual bridegroom was still a vague enough presence. Each of them saw members of the opposite sex as interchangeable parts, with neither of them anything very special to each other. It was the same for their peers, just as it had been for their parents. As Artie's father put it:

"You have to make the most of a thing like this... when you weigh it all up, isn't one marriage like the next one?
A pig in a poke at the best of times"

 "At least, there was nothing that could be destroyed".

For: those who decided they wanted out, there was, of course, no divorce. There was, however, that particular Irish solution to an Irish problem: annulment. Tom McIntyre's Painted Out  had a certain documentary value in outlining the awkward procedures of the annulment process and the mental gymnastics of its tribunals. As drama, however, it was an empty shell. There was no convincing characterisation of the female journalist seeking the annulment, no real sense of what her marriage had been all about, no plausible account of her motivation in pursuing a procedure she scorned. It was mostly talk, talk, talk, empty judicial talk, and it left one feeling flat, dissatisfied and disoriented, rather than incited to sort out the issues it was presumably intended to raise. Hugh Leonard put the disorienting effect down to the direction, criticising the shooting of the tribunal in close-up as making it like sitting too close to a tennis match or reading a novel in which every second word was italicised.ll

An earlier more engaging RTE play by McIntyre was a comic morality play entitled Scruples, the primary point of which was to observe that

 "Scruples only affect the best.
 Most of the population around here never heard of them."

Some plays brought together marital tensions with cultural tensions. They explored the interface in scenarios in which the divide between English and Irish, protestant and catholic, formed the point of tension in a marital situation. Jennifer Johnston's first written-for-television work The Bondage Field was a gritty, highly-charged play, revolving around the shock and subsequent soul-searching of a young English woman, who only discovered that her Irish husband was an IRA volunteer when he was arrested and brought to trial. Looking back, she needed to unweave the implicit lie knit into their relationship. Looking ahead, she had to decide whether to stand by her man or to leave him to his eight years in prison and put Ireland and its troubles behind her. In doing so, she had to cope both with the breakdown of trust between them and with the gap between their cultural backgrounds, which was wider than she had ever imagined. When two IRA men came to visit her, they tried to explain her husband's behaviour in an appeal to the historical context:

 "the way kids get brought up here...the shadows that get laid across their minds...an unending spiral".

From coming of age to memories of lost youth, there were pictures of contemporary life at the various stages of the life cycle, though mainly in a kind of claustrophobic close-up that missed that chance to construct character and context in way in which the one illuminated the other. It wasn't that writers, directors and the rest didn't try to do so. It was that one was left with the strong impression that few had either the psychological or the sociological insight to do so any way satisfactorily.

Youth was seen mainly within the family home or within the immediate circle of family friends in the local community. Schools seemed to be a no-go area after The Spike, though Choosing did give small glimpses of student life at university level. There were some interesting critical representations of christian brothers education during this period, but they were in other media. In the cinema, there was Cathal Black's Our Boys and, in the theatre, there was Neil Donnelly's Silver Dollar Boys, Irish counterparts of the Australian The Devil's Playground and the American Catholic Boys. On the female side, the only representation of convent education was in the cinema, in Desmond Davis' film of Edna O'Brien's story The Country Girls. But, as far as television was concerned, schools were virtually absent in RTE's in-house productions, though Irish schools did appear occasionally in co-productions, in the Access dramas and in British television drama set in Ireland. There was not a single school in any of its serials in the 1980s.  Barbara McKeon's Amy took youth into a city centre disco, dreaming of a better world than the real one and not easily finding it, pushing some into a dangerous world of fantasy and self-deception. The author's aim was to say something about relationships in a society that promised the good life, but seldom delivered it, but it was hard to say what this was..

Moving into the world of work, the overall picture was fairly sketchy. There was the disco in Amy, where Amy and her friend Val worked as waitresses. There were the Kinsale oil rigs in Choosing, where the students were exposed to workers as "the ones who really run things". There were factories featuring in three different plays, each finding dramatic conflict in the lives of factory workers at three different levels. Martin Duffy's Your Favourite Funnyman concerned the personal and artistic conflicts of a factory worker by day and stand-up comedian by night. Once he began writing his own material and sacrificing secure routines to develop his craft, he met with discouragement from all sides, from wife, factory boss, cabaret manager and audience. Deciding that Ireland with its peasant background and provincialism was hostile to talent, he took the boat.

Men of Consequence, Martin Duffy's next play, dealt with the trade union activist up against the system. John Burke, lathe operator and alienated wage labourer, produced a newsletter, giving details of the company's takeover by a multi-national corporation, managers' salaries and expense accounts. In turn, the management recommended to the company doctor that he be superannuated on the grounds of "temperamental unsuitability for work", making him, at the age of 28, not only unemployed, but unemployable. His appeal for union support ran up against the stone wall of the average worker interested only in his own wage packet and the union representative settled into a cozy, mutually back scratching relationship with management. Anyone wanting to change the world was a square peg in a world of round holes. The company's welfare officer, however, was once a social worker who wanted to change the world and had been seduced by notions of Carson's as a caring organisation. Faced with the reality of his position as the company's hatchet man, he was brought into a crisis of conscience over the management's use of the superannuation scheme to victimise a dissident worker. The representation of women was very unflattering, although not altogether unrealistic. It was the time-honoured image of women as having small minds, filled with the trivial practicalities of life, incapable of seeing beyond small details and home comforts to larger principles and social causes. In two parallel domestic scenes, John Burke, the trade union activist, and Tom Nesbitt, the welfare officer, were pictured at home with their wives discussing the situation. John Burke's wife mocked him for playing the hero and stirring up trouble and argued that supporting his wife and children shouldn't leave him any time for trade union crusades. In a tone of shrill and embittered bitchiness, she asked if she was supposed to be honoured to live in misery with some eejit, who thought he was a hero of the working classes. He in turn gave out to her for being small-minded and always taking the bosses' side. When he explained that he had his principles, she replied:

 "You can't eat principles".

 "You can't shave without looking yourself in the face".

"That type moans about anything that might constitute a day's work... The root of the trouble is always a small group of agitators who would rather spend hot air than do an honest day's work".

" A consequence is the result of some effective action... working class people are bred to be inconsequential."

Also on the terrain of the multinational company in Ireland, in relation to the workforce, was Edmund Ward's Visitors. Raising problems on a different scale and level, it examined the implications of IDA policy on industrial development, which allowed multi-national companies to set up in Ireland with the help of IDA grants and then pull out when the grant concessions expired. This made possible not only the exploitation of the worker as wage labourer, but as tax payer as well. In the case of the particular rip-off, fly-by-night operation of this play, the man assigned to oversee the creation and demise of the town's brave new world of industrial development was a local lad made good. Twisting the knife, it was their own John Kinsella, who would preside over the con-job of Rathkilly's 400 job white elephant and be the instrument of their betrayal. Commenting on his title of vice-president in charge of factory relocation, he cynically observed:

"Looks better under my signature than chief con-man, subsidy-juggler and extortioner of maximum tax concessions. Shorter too.”

"Before you go flinging my life in the dustbin, let me tell you it wasn't a waste. There are a couple of people I'm glad I met, books that gave me pleasure, photographs, paintings. Does none of that count? Is it so important to have your name on the door?"

It reflected a particular theme running through much of modern literature, that of the individual, dropping out of the rat-race and finding his identity within rather than without, in his soul rather than on the door. The drama of contemporary working life tended to be somewhat narrowly conceived. It tended to pit powerful systems over against impotent individuals, who either conformed or resisted the system in their individual ways. At least they were individuals who actually worked and sometimes had ideas and manifested some degree of social awareness, rather than lumpen, inarticulate, anti-social, quasi-criminal figures. However, the absence of drama dealing with the consequential collective activity of the working class was particularly conspicuous at a time when hundreds of thousands were engaged in national work stoppages and marching on the streets, demanding tax equity for the PAYE sector, demonstrating the class tension building up in Irish society and the power of the trade union movement to harness it.

The fate of those having to uproot themselves and emigrate to find work was still a recurring theme, with the question of the possibility of coming home again looming much larger than the advantages of going where the labour market took them. On similar terrain to Maeve Binchy's Ireland of the Welcomes was Sean Walsh's The Dreamers. It was about two mates working as labourers and living in a bedsit in London, talking about achieving many things and returning to Ireland and raising the question of whether their dreaming had become a substitute for living. The comings and goings of emigrant labour, with many variations upon the theme, was also a prominent motif in serials and co-productions.

A new twist to migration patterns was implicit in the policy of attracting writers to Ireland through tax exemptions. There was an effort during this period to get such writers to write for television to give a view of Ireland from both inside and outside in this way. Out of this came such plays as Edmund Ward's Visitors on the role of the multi-nationals in Ireland and Peter Driscoll's The Babysitters, a psychological thriller. In The Babysitters, as in Passing Through, a literary tax refugee was present in the drama as a central character.  Ireland's experience of finding its way and giving cultural expression to its experience in an increasingly cosmopolitan context meant many new twists and turns to old traditions and the emergence of all sorts of hybrid phenomena. The characteristically modern preoccupation with psychotherapy found expression in Gabriel Rosenstock's Irish language play Airc, an off-beat treatment of the psychiatric institution and the funnier side of group therapy.

However, whatever the trials and tribulations, the joys and the sorrows, life went on and time passed. The problems of coming of age gave way to problems of ageing and memories of lost youth. In both plays looking at life from the vantage point of its later years, music played a key part, as the carrier of strong memories and frail hopes. In Lee Gallaher's The Second Last Post, the death of an obscure piano player reunited the members of a former band and revived their remembrances of the days of the Aces High. In reviving the legend of Charlie D' Arcy and not allowing the star of their show to be consigned to a four-and-a-half line obituary, they were seeking to rescue their own disappointed lives from varying degrees of obscurity and to give them a new dimension of significance. There was a sort of desperation in their reliving of old times and replaying of old tunes, revealing a series of shattered lives where "most of the knockdowns happened on the inside of the bodies." In Eugene McCabe's Winter Music, an old piano left over after an auction at a derelict estate became the symbol of lost opportunities and the embodiment of last hopes, for an elderly spinster living with her two bickering bachelor brothers. Into the atmosphere of decay on their dilapidated border farm, where they lived their dour domestic life, Annie wanted only to bring this one beautiful, if also dilapidated, thing. The disappointment of even this one modest wish, and the pathos of seeing it rot and then smashed outside her door, left her feeling that she would be better off dead.

There was a strong driving purpose in the drama policy producing the plays of this late 1970s-early 1980s period. There was a strong demand for contemporary drama taking on the problematic areas in Irish society. There was a willingness to take risks. There was opportunity for new writers. However, in assessing the results of this wholly admirable policy, it was generally agreed that the productions of this period were of very uneven quality. Some, like Deeply Regretted By, Assault on a Citadel and An Taoille Tuile, were excellent scripts and excellent productions. Others, however, radiated a certain sincerity and raised important issues, but showed signs of inadequate script development and make-do production. Some were actually painful to watch. Still Love, although the direction gave it an attractive visual look, was based on a script which gave hopelessly superficial and stilted treatment to a conflict between love and marriage, which must have been irritating and alienating to anyone to whom such conflict had come as a deep and highly charged experience. Painted Out gave such flat, myopic treatment to breakdown of marriage and annulment procedures that it lost the wood for the trees and did nothing to make anyone care.

Although the emphasis was on contemporary written-for-television drama, there was still some historical drama and literary or theatrical adaptation. There was a four part adaptation of Kate O'Brien's novel The Ante Room, set in late-victorian Ireland and vividly evoking the claustrophobia and guilt-ridden milieu of the catholic bourgeoisie of the era. In an environment heavy with catholic ritual, social respectability and impending death, illicit love was pitted against family loyalties, social mores and religious prohibitions with tragic consequences. There was the six part series Tales of Kilnavarna, adapted from John B. Keane's books by Joe O'Donnell. It gave an amusing and affectionate picture of the manners and mores pervading traditional Irish rural life, with each episode coming at it with the focus on a particular prototypical character with a particular role in the community. There was The Postman`s Story, The Publican's Story, The Matchmaker's Story, The TD's Story.

To celebrate the O'Casey centenary in 1980, there was a thirteen part series entitled Sean, based on O’Hare’s autobiographies and adapted by Michael Voysey, Neil Jordan and Eugene McCabe. It was not regarded, in or out of RTE, as a successful production. Part of the problem was perhaps with giving the autobiographies, generally regarded as shapeless, self-indulgent and inaccurate, such weight in a serious biographical treatment of O'Casey. There was also the fact that the style of the production was very stagey. It was a theatrical style of television that was becoming less and less satisfactory to an audience becoming increasingly accustomed to a more filmic style of television. There was also a co-production arrangement with BBC to make television adaptations of O'Casey plays, with RTE making The Silver Tassie and BBC doing Red Roses for Me and Juno and The Paycock, to be shown on both channels to mark the centenary.

The really outstanding historical drama of this time, indeed of RTE's whole history, was Strumpet City. It was a seven part adaptation of James Plunkett's epic novel, an international bestseller first published in 1969, giving a panoramic view of Dublin life during the years 1907 to 1914, years of direct and bitter confrontation between capital and labour. The epic scale and penetrating truthfulness of Plunkett's novel were skilfully reproduced and even enhanced by the quality of virtually every aspect of the RTE production: the script by Hugh Leonard, the direction by Tony Barry, the performances by Irish actors, the use of film and authentic locations. It was RTE's most expensive production to that date. It functioned as a showcase product, marking RTE's biggest breakthrough on the international market and establishing RTE's credentials as a producer of high quality television drama. It was shown and acclaimed in 52 countries in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Africa, Australia and Latin America. It received only a very limited airing in the USA on CBS cable television. Although it would have seemed the ideal product for the PBS Masterpiece Theatre slot, it was rejected on the grounds that the accents would have been incomprehensible to an American audience, an ironic comment in a world where there was no problem with the accents in Dallas from Montevideo to Milan to Manila. It was, of course, tied to the problem of the one-way global flow of communications and the fact that even what the more cultured element of the American audience, gravitating to the PBS, could accommodate from abroad was limited. In Plunkett's view, they prefer upper-crust British stuff to anything with a working class content.12 It would seem that RTE had its eye on the American audience. The casting of Peter Ustinov as the king and of Peter O'Toole as Larkin brought the whole force of the Hollywood star system to bear upon its marketability. Such casting was hardly necessary, or even particularly appropriate, either for aesthetic reasons or for considerations of historical verisimilitude. It was obviously connected to the movement of RTE productions and personnel into the international arena.

However, these were only cameo roles and Irish actors bore the weight of conveying the more important characters and their meaning in Irish social history to their most important audience, that of contemporary Irish society. It was enormously well received by the Irish audience and was particularly popular in Dublin. The characters were extraordinarily well conceived and well conveyed to counterpoint each other and to create a comprehensive social canvas. Stating his intentions in setting the story up in the way that he did, Plunkett said:

“I wanted to explore what I knew of the city, to get it out of myself and find a shape for my feeling about it... Thinking that O'Casey had dealt with the submerged, deprived city and Joyce with the seedy gentility, I thought I would try to get the lot in -the company director types, the priests, the decent working men, and the utterly outcast.”13

Among the women, all, except those in domestic service, owed their standard of living and place in society to their sexuality. From the pampered luxury of the childless Mrs. Bradshaw to the precarious poverty of the fertile Mrs. Hennessy, they lived by their status as wives. All, that is, except the prostitute Lily Maxwell, whose femininity was associated with more direct financial arrangements. The women, although they occupied definite ideological positions, tended to be ideologically unconscious and inarticulate, functioning as 'humanising' influences, pulling men away from their moral principles and political ideologies to domestic practicalities and general human qualities. Only Miss Gilchrist was the direct voice of a political position, that of militant fenianism, a rural nationalist ideology marginal to the urban class struggles of her Dublin context.

With so many characters directly or indirectly bearing so much ideological weight, some might argue that they were stereotypes. There was a popular prejudice to the effect that characters who spoke for strong ideological positions became ciphers and could not be richly textured individuals or psychologically complex human beings. The characters in Strumpet City, however, were colourfully individual and often quite complex. In fact, their ideological specificity enhanced the strength and quality of their characterisation. There were also a number of interconnections cutting across class lines, a fair amount of attention to human qualities binding people outside ideological categories and separating people within them.

Martin McLoone argued that this thrust to a general humanism had the effect of containing and disguising class oppression. Criticising the characterisation from the opposite angle, he contended that the emphasis on general human qualities forced the individuality of each of the characters into a pattern of stereotypes. According to him, the characters that were the strongest mouthpieces for political positions (Mr. Bradshaw, Fr. O'Connor, Mulhall) did not move. Their confrontations resulted in ideological stand-off. A pattern of movement and compromise was pursued through the symbolic presence of children, as victims caught in the middle, and the regressive stereotyping of women. Thus Mary was the chaste rural maiden become loving mother (Mary-virgin-mother) and Lily was the proverbial prostitute with a heart of gold.14 Asked to reply to this argument, Plunkett commented that McLoone read too much into the text. He conceded, however, that if an author cared enough about character, if he dealt with the human element in all characters, class lines would be blurred.15 But this was perhaps to concede too much. Tony Barry argued that the characters were not stereotypes in the sense of being clichés  They did represent the people of the time and showed the history of the time in terms of the truth in the souls of ordinary people. They were based on people the author actually knew.16

The defence could be put in even stronger terms. Because the characters in Strumpet City were representative types of a particular socio-historical conjuncture, without being rigid reproductions of clichéd characteristics, they were able to mobilise audience interest simultaneously in their individual life stories and  in the historical fate of the forces which they represented.  Because they represented social forces, as embodied in full blooded and richly specific individuals, they manifested all the more vividly the reality of class oppression. Unlike Dallas and Dynasty, which manipulated audience sympathy for the human vulnerability of characters deeply implicated in class oppression, Strumpet City never lost its critical edge or blurred class lines. Dallas and Dynasty were constructed to bring the audience into a myopic identification with Pam's bereavement, Clayton's financial problems, Fallon's amnesia, Amanda's royal romance, Blake's affection for his children, while cutting out any consideration of the class structure which supports such people in their luxurious, exploitative and parasitic lives.

Strumpet City, however, was structured in such a way as to counterpoint the opulence of Kingstown with the poverty of the inner city tenements. Even within the Bradshaw household in Kingstown, life upstairs was constantly seen against life downstairs. No matter how warm, gentle or concerned Mrs. Bradshaw was seen to be, it was clear that her way of life was grounded in the exploitation of others, as servants, as tenants and as workers. There were no details about masters or mistresses detached from relevant details about their servants. The landlord's life was seen in clear contrast to that of his tenants. The employer's place in the scheme of things was sharply focused vis-a-vis the labour of his workers. Neither Plunkett nor Barry have done Strumpet City full justice in insisting it was 'not political' but 'about people'. This failed to take account of the .way in which any construction of what a person's life was all about was implicitly political. A person's life was inevitably shaped by forces larger than him/herself, by political structures which determined their place in the scheme of things. A production might or might not approach this with honesty and insight. Strumpet City did, whereas Dallas and Dynasty did not. It illuminated the class forces through the characters and highlighted the social structures through their stories, in contrast to the way in which most productions systematically obscured class forces and social structures through their myopic and sentimental view of character and storyline in which they not only foregrounded individuals but de-contextualised them. The place of the towering figure of Larkin in the overall narrative was significant in this respect. In much of the folk tradition surrounding Larkin in the Irish trade union movement, he has been treated as a mythical figure, whose individual will determined the course of historical events. In songs and stories, the rise and fall of labour corresponded to the coming and going of Larkin:

 "Then on came Larkin like a mighty wave.
 We stood by Larkin through thick and thin.
Then Larkin left us. We seemed defeated.
 The night was black for the working man."

 Mulhall: "Larkin will put a stop to stevedores being paid in pubs".

 Fr. O'Connor: (On coming across riots in the street): "Mr. Larkin's handiwork, no doubt".

The story line of Strumpet City was a complex narrative.  Opening on the young Mary leaving her country home and going into domestic service in the city, it followed her in coming to terms with the duties and restrictions imposed by the Bradshaws, through falling in love with Fitz, a Dublin worker, and subsequently marrying and bearing children in a Dublin tenement. In an intricate weave of plots and subplots, the mounting tension between capital and labour featured prominently, not only in terms of exploitative wages and conditions, but in terms of the elemental struggle for the right of trade union organisation, culminating in the lockout of 1913, which reduced the Dublin working class to starvation and brought the immediate objectives of the labour movement to defeat. Along the way, there was the fanfare of the royal visit; the abandonment of Miss Gilchrist to the workhouse; the imprisonment of Rashers, Mulhall, Bannister and Larkin; the blacklisting of Farrell; the scabbing of Hennessy; the use of confraternity food parcels to break the strike; the confrontation at the docks as starving children were put on the boat to working class homes in protestant England; the accident at the foundry in which Mulhall lost his legs; the tragic deaths of Miss Gilchrist, Mulhall and Rashers; the final enlistment of Fitz in the British Army.

The narrative was full of ideologically charged discourse.  There were overt declarations of political allegiances:

Fr. O'Connor: "We condemn Marx."

Mr. Yearling: "You broke Parnell."

Pat Bannister: "Royalty will go. So will the exploiters."

Speaker at mass meeting: "The employers, the police and the clergy are our enemies."

 Larkin:  “An injury to one is the concern of all.”

 Fr. O'Connor: "Surely sin is the only thing worth being concerned about".

It was a story of brave struggle and bitter defeat, leaving Dublin as prostituted in the end as in the beginning, thus the significance of the title. Opening on the strumpet hailing royalty on the occasion of the king's visit and closing on it being forced to prostitute itself to the power of capital, Dublin was Strumpet City. Like Lily Maxwell, it had its endearing features and it had ties of loyalty transcending both feudal bonds and market forces but it had succumbed to contagious disease.  Coming to the ideological bottom line of Strumpet City's significance in RTE's history, McLoone's analysis made very  strong claims, regarding it not only as a turning point for Irish television drama, but as a consummation of the ideological project  of Irish television over two decades:

The real significance of the serial lies in the way in which it inserts itself into Irish culture in a specific way and at a specific historical moment... despite the rather hard-nosed practicality of its conception, Strumpet City stands as a paradigm of the ruptures and contradictions of contemporary Irish society... Strumpet City can be seen to analyse how the Church eventually overcame the oppositional forces of socialism and liberalism at a crucial moment in the formation of the modern Irish state. The victory that this represents does not, however, re-affirm a consensus, or a status quo...as Upstairs, Downstairs and Edward the Seventh does for constitutional monarchy and social democracy in contemporary Britain. On the contrary...the contemporary resonances are not re-affirmation of this victory, but a confirmation of the values of defeated forces and an implicit acknowledgement that the struggle continues. Strumpet City attempts to open out hidden, disguised or temporarily defeated ideologies... The thrust of the narrative was towards social democracy, but the combination of its formal devices and the fissures in contemporary Ireland gives equal weighting to other oppositional elements.18

Such conclusions were well warranted.

In Tony Barry's view, historical drama could be a cop-out from the present. Strumpet City, he argued, proved that it need not be. Unlike Brideshead Revisited  and The Jewel in the Crown, which lingered on the problems of the privileged and glossed over the cultures they robbed, Strumpet City was honest and pulled no punches on difficult questions. Historical drama, in his opinion, should only be done if it was honest. If not, it should not be done.19

RTE proceeded to produce more historical drama, some of it equally large-scale, at least in terms of the resources put into such productions, but whether any were as rigorously honest or as challengingly resonant in contemporary significance was another matter.

* Regarding co-productions, the degree of RTE involvement varied considerably from one production to another. The Year of the French, Caught in a Free State,  Love Stories of Ireland, Night in Tunisia, A Life, Summer Lightning and Spring Cleaning were RTE-initiated projects, in which RTE had full editorial control and foreign input was limited mainly to financial investment. In the case of The Year of the French, there was script consultation, casting and subtitling involvement from the French side. At the other extreme were productions initiated elsewhere, with the editorial control residing elsewhere with minimal RTE input, such as The Irish RM and Roses from Dublin. In the same category too were Good Behaviour, Langrishe, Go Down, Ballroom of Romance and One of Ourselves, which were essentially BBC productions, although the latter two had an RTE director. In a middle category, there was The Price which was initiated and directed by Astramead, but had an RTE executive producer. In an altogether different category was When Reason Sleeps initiated by Strongbow, with three out of the four films being made by Strongbow and one being made by RTE.

Like Strumpet City, all of the subsequent historical mini-series were literary adaptations. Unlike Strumpet City, all made after 1980 were co-productions, due to changing conditions on the world market. Always the most expensive type of television to make, rising costs and the high technical standards set by imported drama had upped the ante as far as drama production was concerned, even more so in the case of elaborately mounted costume drama in a period setting.

The Year of the French was a six part adaptation of the novel of the same name by Thomas Flanagan. It was an RTE co-production with Channel 4 in Britain and FR3 in France. Despite the huge resources put into its production, including five months filming and a £2 million budget (more than twice that of Strumpet City), it was nowhere nearly so successful. Set in 1798, it concerned the influence of the principles of the French revolution in Ireland, resulting in a French invasion of Ireland in an alliance with Irish forces in rebellion against British rule. It showed the positions taken up by such historical figures as Theobald Wolfe Tone, George Moore, John Moore, Owen McCarthy, Fr. Murphy, Lord Cornwallis and General Humbert. It showed how the United Irishmen, the whiteboys and the impoverished and oppressed peasantry put their hopes in the arrival of the forces of republican France, to free them from the tyranny of British monarchy and its agents, including the castle catholics, in Ireland. It showed, more than anything, soldiers to-ing and fro-ing, marching here and marching there, generals planning battles and soldiers fighting battles.

The enduring impression left by it was of large-scale action adventure battle scenes, of in-between discussions of politics (in the most superficial sense of the term) and of the poet McCarthy speaking in the most high-flown poetic language at the drop of a hat and with a straight face. The injection of some romance into the scenario did not add much in the way of penetration into the human dimensions of it all. It certainly added nothing to the credibility of the McCarthy character. In addition to spouting instant poetry for every occasion, he made love with his trousers and boots on. There was little to take it too far from the level of pre-adolescent boys, mad on battle scenes and not yet interested in sex. But then if that were the intended audience, they could have done without the politics, the poetry and the romance altogether.

Although it was beautifully filmed in parts and the music of the Chieftains gave it a certain style, as did some of the dialogue by Eugene McCabe, it was a very flawed production. Even on the simplest level, the subtitles were full of mis-spelling and incorrect punctuation. (It was a tri-lingual production, made in English, Irish and French). More serious, however, was the fact that it lacked any deeper penetration into the socio-historical context. Criticising it from this angle, Eoghan Harris described The Year of the French as an Ivanhoe-type of production, which evaded such important questions as class conflict among the peasantry and imposed a simple cowboys-and-indians formula on the complex historical landscape of late 18th century Ireland.20  Michael Garvey, who directed it,  said in retrospect that the production had a frantic quality and admitted that it was difficult to believe in McCarthy. He observed that they went to great lengths to avoid paddywackery, but perhaps they went to the opposite extreme and made the production too reverential to work.21

The same could not be said of the next major historical miniseries made in a RTE-initiated co-production. Caught in a Free State was a four part dramatisation of the activities of German intelligence in Ireland during World War II. The original idea came from director Peter Ormrod and the script was written by Brian Lynch, based on such historical accounts as Enno Stephens' Spies in Ireland. Given the German angle, RTE made a strenuous effort, through its director of sales and co-productions John Baragwanath, to interest German television services in investing in the project as a co-production. Despite various changes offered in relation to their objections to the script, German television not only declined to invest in it, but refused to show it once it was made as a co-production with Channel 4. The Germans did not feel their agents were treated in a suitably respectful manner. They objected to suggestions of sexual ambivalence and generally found the images presented not teutonic enough.22 Not that anyone was treated in a particularly respectful manner. From foreign diplomats to the indigenous plain people of Ireland, nearly all were figures of fun. There was certainly a fair bit of paddy-wackery about it, even if the paddys were only one species in a generally wacky menagerie.

It was meant to tell a serious, and even tragic, story and to reverse the traditional view of Irish history during 'the emergency', the Irish euphemism for World War II. Far from underplaying, or even denying, Irish flirtation with the forces of fascism, Caught in a Free State put the highly ambiguous nature of Irish neutrality to the fore. It not only showed such diverse dissident forces as the IRA and the blueshirts to have been anxious to have their lines of connection to Nazi Germany, but also indicated a certain sympathy among the more official representatives of the free state. It was also meant to show how history had its farcical, and even ludicrous, elements. Indeed, it gave the farcical and ludicrous elements the upper hand. Some of it was in the nature of political irony. There were such moments as the IRA chief of staff revealing that even thought his title as "de jure head of the Irish government" a bit of a joke. There were such utterances as the IRA woman's comment: "Violence, I know, is a sacred thing " Some of it was simple slapstick, like a German agent scurrying about in drag. Some of it was stage Irish clowning, with most Irish characters having a silly music hall sort of song-and-dance shading to them.

The whole thing had an oddly disorienting effect. At times, the insightful treatment of the serious pressures on the Irish government during the war or some reference sparking memories of the enormous suffering the war meant for so much of the world, in juxtaposition with cheeky music or knockabout carry-on, had a jarring effect. When asked if it was supposed to be funny or serious, those behind it answered "both". There are, of course, very different ways of combining the comic with the tragic, of juxtaposing the humourous with the serious side of things. For some, this particular way of doing it worked supremely well. For others, it did not. The clowning seemed gratuitously added on to the succession of events, rather than organically flowing through them.

However, for stage Irish clowning and knockabout paddy wackery.  it would have been hard to beat The Irish RM, another co-production of the same period. One of Channel 4's first commissions, the first series of six episodes was made by a consortium which included RTE. It was enormously popular, not only in Britain and Ireland, but in more than 30 other countries including the USA. A second and third series were subsequently made. An adaptation of the Somerville and Ross stories, it was set in Skebawn at the turn of the century. It opened with the arrival of an English resident magistrate in Ireland and followed him through a whole gamut of farcical experiences of revelation and adjustment, as he attempted to come to terms with the quaint and comic ways of the native peasantry. Setting up Peter Bowles as the stage Englishman, as foil to a whole range of stage Irishmen, it pitted English common sense, sobriety, responsibility and fair play against Irish superstition, drunkenness, fecklessness, charm and deviousness.

Like the literary works of Somerville and Ross in their own time, the television production confirmed all the English caricatures of the Irish. It moreover got the Irish to conspire in the caricaturing of themselves, once more playing the paddy and tugging the forelock and being grateful to be noticed by the rest of the world at all. Even the bit of bite to the portrayal of colonial attitudes in both colonisers and colonised in the literary source were lost to the clowning of the television production. It was escapist farce, painting a "good old days" big house picture of the past: full of foxhunts, horseflesh, eccentric old ladies, educated gentlemen and pig ignorant peasants, made attractive by stylish camera work, lush landscapes and Chieftains music.

The first series of The Irish RM was immediately followed by a six part mini-series Roses from Dublin, as if an Anglo-Irish co-production, parading English stereotypes of 19th century Ireland, should be complemented by a Franco-Irish co-production, parading French stereotypes of 20th century Ireland. Using a parallel device to the coming of an Englishman to Ireland, this variation had a Frenchman coming to Ireland. This French photographer proceeded to fall in love with a comely colleen from County Kerry by the name of Spring Kavanagh (!). Also featured were the said colleen's five formidable Finn McCool brothers, all gigantic veterans of Irish Rugby Union, along with a Greek poet and a chic Parisienne married to a Dingle publican. It was a whimsical "all their wars are merry" view of Ireland, which might have been amusing to the sort of circussy crowd that gathered at Beaubourg on a sunny day, but it was ridiculous to an Irish audience. Reviewing Roses from Dublin in The Irish Press, Tom O'Dea envisioned its inception in a crowd of television executives in an airport hotel deciding to buy all the film footage left over from the Sally O'Brien Harp advertisements, along with the Cadbury Milk Tray advertisements, and to intercut these with film footage from The Quiet Man and Darby O 'Gill and the Little People and videos of Triple Crown matches. He called it a 'gigantic hoax' that kept all the secrets of the real Ireland firmly hidden.23

The next co-produced mini-series was Good Behaviour, a three part adaptation by Hugh Leonard of the Molly Keane novel. It was back in the territory of the Anglo-lrish big house. Unlike Somerville and Ross, writing in the heyday of the ascendancy, Molly Keane wrote of it within its decline and her work was a series of laments for its passing. It was been more perceptive regarding the manners and mores of the gentry , but also more inward looking. Good Behaviour was an ironic commentary on the codes of behaviour prevailing in the big house, but it was also an insider's indulgence of their claustrophobic world. An RTE-BBC co-production, it was very much in the tradition of BBC costume drama. Set on a country estate with the fairy tale name of Temple Alice, the head of the household was dying amidst the shabby elegance of a house full of champagne tastes and unpaid bills, full of emotionless decorum on the outside and emotional conflict on the inside. Whatever happened, the codes of 'good behaviour' had to be maintained. So narrowly focused was the drama on the domestic sphere that the outside world was all but invisible. It was not even all that recognisably set in Ireland and did not cast Irish actors. It seemed like any other English country house drama, except for the presence of an Irish maid who kept the major happy with forbidden whiskey and her hand under the bedclothes. It carried no real Irish resonance. It was the odd Irish character who looked somehow out of place. It treated the Anglo-Irish as English. It showed a class facing extinction from forces which it could not comprehend or confront, but it shed no light on those forces and left the impression that the author herself could not comprehend or confront the wider socio-historical forces shaping her characters in their claustrophobic world.

The remaining co-productions of this period (with the exception of The Price) were not mini-series, but once-off dramas, no longer called single plays, but more appropriately called television films, and reflecting the shift from theatrical to cinematic) styles and structures. Most were literary adaptations set in the past.

The most successful was the award-winning RTE-BBC co-production The Ballroom of Romance. Based on William Trevor's short story, originally set in 1971, this production pushed it back into the 1950s. In the same vein as Teresa's Wedding, Trevor was taking up the exploration of dead-end lives, lack of meaningful human contact, especially between the sexes, and marriages of convenience. In the same mood of resignation, the central female character considered her lot and went on to face her bleak and inevitable fate in a loveless marriage. In this story, the no longer-young (36) Bridie had been living a typical life of quiet desperation, looking after an aged parent and watching life pass her by. The drudgery of her work on the farm and the banality of her evenings with her father by the fire were relieved only by her weekly trip to a tawdry dance hall in the middle of nowhere. The ballroom scenes gave a vivid picture of the lives of those left behind in a rural community depleted and desolated by the ravages of emigration and by the legacy of underdevelopment. In a ritualistic speech, the owner of the dance hall related the latest news of those who had emigrated, banns, marriages, and babies, and struggled to strike a note of reassurance:

 "Old values are falling away from us, but they are still here in this ballroom of romance."

Madge: "What's she got that I haven't?"
Bowser: "Land."

The direction given to the production by Pat O'Connor was true to the story and did not bask in nostalgia. The visual style was sophisticated, but not at all showy. The camera held on the stillness, instead of cutting back and forth. It gave a static sort of picture of static men and women sitting against the solid wall to capture the way in which people were trapped in their circumstances, knowing they were going nowhere and had no way out.  It followed the cyclists at night through the spaces between the rural homes and showed the small lights against a vast darkness to convey the remoteness and isolation of rural life. It showed the garishness of the brightly lit ballroom amidst it all and the tackiness of the milieu and did not attempt to give a false glossiness to it.

There were various sorts of criticism laid against it, however. Barbara O'Connor's audience research indicated that urban youth found it alienating, because it was rural, and that working class women found it too slow-moving and lacking in storyline and dramatic suspense. While her extrapolation from limited data, to the general conclusion that the female audience for this type of one-off play was confined to middle class women, was unwarranted and based on questionable criteria for determining class, some of her other observations of the film were more substantial. She particularly called attention to the way in which the film was narratively closed in the recurrent motif of resignation to fate. She also noted that the setting in time and place tended to distance it from the contemporary female audience.24 Another critical angle on the story, remarked upon by Kevin McHugh,
concerned the fact that its dominant point of view was from outside the milieu it scrutinised. It was one culture looking at another in a way that sometimes seemed patronising. 25

The same production team followed The Ballroom of Romance with One of Ourselves, another RTE-BBC co-production. It was an adaptation of another William Trevor story, originally entitled An Evening with John Joe Dempsey. It was a coming-of-age story, featuring John Joe Dempsey on the occasion of his fifteenth birthday. At his happiest when alone with his fantasies or when keeping company with the town eccentric, John Joe was at a turning point in his life and under pressure to give up both fantasies and friend to become "one of ourselves" in the town. At the point of leaving the christian brothers school and going to work in the sawmills, John Joe was preoccupied with his imaginary encounters with the middle aged women of the town in suggestive or seductive situations or with listening to Quigley tell tales of looking through windows and seeing virtually every married couple in the town in their most intimate moments. Given the day that was in it, John Joe was diverted in his messages to the shop-cum-pub by Mr. Lynch, who introduced him to his first bottles of stout and smokes and told him a certain story he took it upon himself to tell to boys who had no fathers. It concerned the 'Piccadilly glory girls' he had encountered when he left West Cork to join the British Army during the war. When intoxicated with his mates, an arrangement was made for the six of them to 'satisfy themselves' on one of the glory girls. While waiting to get 'down to business', he had a vision of the statue of the holy virgin mother that his mother had given him for his first communion. On that very night, he later discovered, his mother had a dream of him with his legs on fire. As he interpreted it, his mother saw him being licked by the flames of hell and sent out a message that he was to have a visit from the little statue in his bedroom. The moral of the story was:

 "The facts of life is one thing, John Joe, but keep away from dirty women."

Like The Ballroom of Romance, it was a bleak picture of the dead-end, numbing hopelessness of provincial life. It also was, nevertheless, filtered through a soft-focused, rose-tinged nostalgia for 1950s Ireland on the part of some of its audience. It was seen by Pat O'Connor as an opportunity to satirise, with as much kindness and subtlety as possible the emptiness and oppressiveness of an environment cut off from healthy debate and lacking in openness, enlightenment and generosity. It was, it would seem, too kind and too subtle for those still most locked into such an environment to see the satire. Perhaps it was just as well. Those who had eyes to see, saw, and the rest were spared having to write letters of protest or to pass resolutions of condemnation.

There was a rash of coming-of-age films set in the recent past around this time. Some of them were considerably less incisive than One of Ourselves and lent themselves much more obviously to a flabby and meandering nostalgia for adolescent adventures and past decades. It was hard to see the point of Night in Tunisia, other than evoking the atmosphere of summers in Laytown in the early 1960s and detailing the particular memory images deriving from the author's own adolescence. An RTE-Channel 4 co-production, it was an adaptation by Neil Jordan of his own short story of the same name. It was given an attractive visual style by Pat O'Connor's direction and it was rich in the atmospheric detail of Neil Jordan's fiction. It was full of beaches, sand dunes, waves, seaside huts, chalets, dance halls, saxophones, radios, photographs, records. It had people talking, walking, waiting, dancing, kissing, quarrelling, making music, playing tennis, getting through puberty and beginning to come to terms with the opposite sex. It seemed, however, indulgent of all this particular detail to no apparent purpose. It all seemed ill digested. It never came together into anything coherent. It was quite lacking in narrative drive or dramatic tension. It never said anything significant or profound, although it had an aura of significance and a kind of pseudo-profundity about it, which made it extremely irritating to someone who knew the difference. It was not really enough to have a teenage would-be tragic heroine talking of walking into the sea and committing suicide. Even when the dialogue seemed to be at its most probing, it went nowhere:

"They tell me you were nearly drowned."
"I wanted to know what it would feel like."
"Like going to another place "
"Tunisia"
"Where's that?"

In an effort by RTE to promote more effectively its film versions of literary works, the next stories were chosen to be packaged together into an anthology series under the title Love  Stories of Ireland. Four films were made under this title as RTE-Channel 4 co-productions and the four were shown on successive weeks on RTE and in the Film on Four slot on Channel 4. (For external sales, there were six films packaged under the anthology title, with Ballroom of Romance and Night in Tunisia added to the package). According to John Lynch, the executive producer of the series, it was very difficult to find Irish love stories. There were actually very few and they were all sad.26

The most memorable and the most successful (in that it won several international awards) was Sean O Faolain's Lovers of the Lake. It concerned a middle aged, middle class, married woman, who had been involved for six years in an extra-marital affair. Full of mental contradictions and moral confusions, she decided to make a pilgrimage to Lough Derg and asked her lover to drive her there and back to Dublin. When he tried to fathom her reasons for 'all this penitential stuff', it all made little sense. Not only had she no rational explanation, but she had scant regard for rationality, which she, like many women, considered a male domain. In turn, he, like many men, had learned to expect anything but rationality from a woman. Her conflict was presented on one level as a conflict between the flesh and the spirit, as a situation in which the spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak. For six years, she confessed her sins of the flesh and her spirit repented and promised to give up her affair. She insisted that she always meant it and yet she always weakened and succumbed again to the flesh. Following her on to the island, her lover continued to probe the meaning of her pilgrimage. Trying to bring both rationality and reality to bear upon her scrambled account of things, he confronted her with his reading of the situation:

"I know you feel you ought to get rid of me, but you haven't the guts to do it on your own, so you run for the mountains and get your druids to do your dirty work for you by magic."

"I renounce the world, the flesh and the devil"

 "I believe in the flesh, Jenny, and in the world. I don't believe that your body and my body are evil. You are not going to renounce the world. You're tied to it hand and foot".

Filmed on location on Lough Derg, with real pilgrims as extras, the RTE production was a richly atmospheric representation of the sense of the place and its strange effect, as described in O Faolain's text. It evoked the way in which the brief harsh utopia worked its magic: how the incantations and passionate exchange of energy drew one in, how exhaustion worked on the mind, how objects began to disconnect, how hallucination and ecstasy set in, how the flesh was used to produce an extraordinary spiritual experience. The haunting music on the soundtrack, composed for the production by Jim Lockhart, underscored the blending of druidic, medieval and modern elements in a most effective way. The film showed Ireland both at its most primitive and its most urbane. The co-existence of the most superstitious and the most sophisticated elements, often in uneasy and illogical juxtaposition with each other, not only in the same culture, but even in the same person, left a thinking person with much food for thought.

The saddest of the sad stories was perhaps A Painful Case from James Joyce's Dubliners. It also concerned an extra-marital love affair involving a married woman, although in this case it did not extend to expressing itself fully in the realm of the flesh. Both Mr. Duffy, a clerk in a merchant bank, and Mrs.Sinico, the wife of a sea captain, led somewhat dull and lonely lives, each taking solitary comfort in music and literature. When they met a deep bond developed between them, each opening up and coming alive as never before in walking and talking and sharing their deepest selves with each other. Mr. Duffy saw himself as a social rebel, at least in the realm of theory, scorning the social conventions of the middle classes in turn-of-the-century Dublin, and yet holding himself aloof from the radical currents of the day, never quite fitting into the Irish Socialist Party and only commenting from a distance on the suffragette movement. Above all, he was an admirer of Ibsen and believed his plays pointed to the right way to live.  Once he had introduced Mrs. Sinico to A Doll's House, she seemed to identify and find courage in Ibsen's Nora, who left her husband to be true to herself. He, however, proved less than courageous in the face of the concrete challenge to follow through and act out his beliefs. Retreating from the bond between them to the 'incurable loneliness of the soul', he decided it was best for them not to meet again. He then resumed his methodical daily routines, aloof and alone, on the surface little different from before, expressing his reflections in his solitary writings. For him, the bottom line of the affair was:

"Love between man and man is impossible, because there mustn't be sexual intercourse. Friendship between man and woman is impossible, because there must be sexual intercourse."

Death of a Lady at Sydney Parade  A Painful Case

A gentler and more sardonic story was James Plunkett's The Eagles and the Trumpets. It spotlighted the lives of three lonely and unhappy people, each of whom momentarily allowed themselves to raise their hopes and wish for romance and happiness. Cutting between Dublin and a small provincial town, it showed something of the depressed economic and cultural condition of Ireland in the late 1940s. In Dublin, a young office clerk had finally saved the money to get back to the provincial town to resume the budding romance begun with the town librarian when on holiday the year before. A friend prevailed upon him to lend him the money, promising to pay it back in time for him to take the later bus. Failing to get the money and therefore the bus, he decided that romance was on the side of the rich and proceeded through the various stages of the pub crawl with his mates. His mates went on about how it was worth having holidays abroad, where the girls were easier, making their motto: "Sin is worth saving for." But money, whatever way it expanded life's options, was what he did not have. So, with one drink after another, he resigned himself to the narrowness of life without it. Meanwhile, the young woman in the country town watched the early and late buses come and go in sad disappointment. Approached by a commercial traveller, whose life had its sad disappointments, she consented to keep him company and each filled at least a little of the emptiness of the other. The bottom line of it all seemed to be that it was bad to want anything too much, because one would probably never get it. There was no indemnity against life's petty tyrannies. One's emotional possibilities were, and always would be, restricted by economic conditions.

The story most stretched to fit into the series was William Trevor's Access to the Children, in that the setting had to be changed from London to Dublin. (It had originally been made in a London setting in a BBC production twelve years earlier). It was the story of the disintegration of a man, who left his wife and children for another woman, who subsequently left him. Living alone in a flat, out of a job and drinking more and more, even his days of access to the children were becoming more difficult, going round and round the same routine of zoos and cinemas and museums and back to his flat. He talked of all of " them getting back together and being a happy family again”.  Unable to come to terms with the fact that his wife had picked up the pieces of her life, gone back to work and formed a relationship with another man, he became more and more pathetic. It was a straightforward enough story in one sense, but in the context of Irish society at the time of its production and transmission, it came across as a cautionary tale against any straying from the straight and narrow path of the institution of marriage. It was perhaps a bit unusual, in showing the man as suffering most from the breakdown of marriage. It was more of a simple, sad story than anything else, without the same sort of sharp edge as some of Trevor's other stories.

Another RTE-Channel 4 co-production took a literary piece, this time of the long-ago-and-far-away variety, and set it in Ireland. Based on Ivan Turgenev's First Love, originally set in 19th century Russia, Summer Lightning was set in mid 19th century Ireland and arguably lost considerably in the translation. Adapted by Paul Joyce and Derek Mahon, Joyce described his intention as wanting "to take a pre-freudian story and to treat it in a post-Freudian way".27 It was a story of a young lad's first experience of love, as told by his mature self, with Paul Scofield doing the honours as the latter, and presumably boosting its sales potential on international markets, in topping and tailing the production and narrating the story in voice-over. It was a coming-of-age story in which an adolescent 'in love with life' discovered, through a traumatic experience, 'the deviousness and complexity of the adult world'. Captivated by a 19-year old girl with a circle of ardent suitors, a 14-year old boy observed them in their drawing room machinations and resolved to kill her leading suitor, once he discovered who he was. The trauma came when his investigation revealed his father's face in the summer lightning. Despite the fact that heartbreak, suicide and death in childbirth ensued, one did not feel the force of the tragedy. Despite the emphasis on internal states and the articulation of such reflections as "First love is like revolution..." one did not feel the penetration of psychological depth. Despite the talk of the failure of the 1798 rebellion, the hopes for Irish nationhood, the fears of clerical interference, the suffering inflicted by the famine, one never felt convinced of the credibility of its Irish setting. Certainly touches such as the transformation of an impoverished Russian princess into a tipsy Ringsend social climber added nothing to its authenticity. Despite the considerable resources channelled into its production, it left the impression of a shallow and glossy period piece, done to no particular purpose.

By way of theatrical, rather than literary, adaptation was the RTE-Channel 4 co-production of Hugh Leonard's stage play A Life. It was the story of Desmond Drumm, a minor civil servant, who had discovered he was about to die and set about preparing an audit of his life. A pompous and pedantic man, his acerbic tongue and condescending presence had a way of creating acute discomfort in those around him. Refusing to accept the evasions and inexactitudes that others promoted, or at least let pass for the sake of peace, he constantly called others to account by his own standards and found them wanting. Now it was time to call himself to account. Finding that he had standards instead of friends and that what he called principle was vanity, his unravelling of the complexities of his life began to break down his defences. His review of his life brought him far more anxiety than satisfaction when the balance sheet was totalled. His career in the civil service he regarded as

 "work of doubtful value for a government of doubtful morality."